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About Me

I’ve been involved in corporate finance for a long time and as such I seem to have been exposed to a very disparate collection of businesses, people and ideas. Great ideas, shite ideas (plenty of those!), top class entrepreneurs, nutters, young winners, old winners, bizarre ideas, crazy situations and fraudulent attempts – and then there’s the investors.

So often the latest, greatest mousetrap seems to be nothing more than a feeble me-too attempt, with a huge marketing budget; business plans always seem to be 5 times longer than they need to be (and rarely say the right things); people have all sorts of wild ideas about how they should behave to either impress investors, or retain control.

In recent months I’ve been invited to sit on a Dragon’s Den panel and witness a dozen or so businesses at a time go through their pitch. It’s often entertaining, sometimes sad and frequently confrontational; never dull.

With all this experience, good, bad and hilarious, I decided to start blogging.

OK, so sometimes I will be promoting some investments, but on the whole I want to try and get a balance between good advice to budding entrepreneurs and sharing some of the more strange or hilarious situations I have either found myself in, or have seen colleagues get into.

Hope you enjoy the blog, from whichever angle you hit upon it.

David Saul

What Does Monkey Island do?
We primarily raise money for small businesses (SME’s) to help them grow, or help companies with company sale or acquisition. Our approach is as follows:

Review the business plan and assess the strategic positioning

Decide what type of funding would be most appropriate

Raise the money

Practical help rolling out the business plan

My Portfolio

These are some of the companies where I sit on the board and/or hold shares: